Stan Lee: Just my luck, I get an interview from Playboy.com and it has to be a guy. And you're probably fully dressed.

Playboy.com: I am fully clothed, my friend. So, how does the big-screen Spidey, who just did booming business this weekend, compare to how you imagined him?

Lee: Spidey on the big screen is just the way I imagined him. In fact, he's even better, because I would never have dared to imagine such breathtakingly wonderful special effects.

Playboy.com: Why did your superheroes, like Spider-man and the X-Men, become so popular?

Lee: To me, the only thing that makes any fictional work interesting is if you care about the characters. When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I enjoyed the mystery, but I found him so fascinating. I found Tarzan fascinating. I think the interplay -- the relationship between the various X-Men characters -- is like a continuing soap opera. People are always bad-mouthing soap operas, but basically they are fascinating because you care about the characters. And today the equivalent are things like Desperate Housewives or Lost.

Playboy.com: Did you think of the X-Men as a soap opera when you created them in 1963?

Lee: No, I never thought about it that definitely. I had already created The Fantastic Four and it sold very well. My publisher at that time said, "Let's do another group of superheroes." I thought it would be fun if I made them teenagers. The most difficult thing is to figure out where they get their superpowers. If I had to have a whole bunch of teenagers and create different ways in which they got their powers, I would have gone nuts. So I took the cowardly way out and said, "Hey, they're just mutants. They were born that way." I had them at a school, but nobody on the outside world knows that it is a school for mutants. I was trying to make them interesting and give them colorful powers and make them different than anything anybody had read before. But no matter if you're Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, if you're writing about people you try to make them compelling so the reader wants to know more about them. That's what I mean by the soap opera thing.

Playboy.com: Your characters deal with day-to-day issues regular people struggle with, whereas Superman, outside of a nasty allergy to Kryptonite, is just about perfect. Talk about developing the human side of characters.

Lee: Superman was a brilliant creation, but the rest of the competition for the most part was one-dimensional. They were good guys who fought the bad guys. Each character had a different power and that's about it. There were exceptions, of course. Even before I got into the business, Carl Burgos had done the Human Torch and Bill Everett had done the Sub-Mariner. Those characters had real personality. Aside from that, there are very few examples where the characters weren't cardboard cutouts. After a few years, I wanted to quit. I didn't like the idea that my publisher didn't want me to use words of more than two syllables because he thought only young kids or stupid adults read comic books. He didn't want me to waste time on dialogue or characterization. He just wanted action. My wife said, "Why don't you do at least one book the way you would like to. The worst that could happen is you get fired and, so what, you want to quit." So I did The Fantastic Four, and I tried to play up their relationships and make it more three-dimensional -- and it worked.

Playboy.com: You grew up in New York during the Great Depression. How did that era affect your creative development?

Lee: The one thing I always wanted was a steady job. My father was a dress cutter and he was mostly always unemployed. I used to feel so sorry for him. He wanted to work and he was very competent but he couldn't get any work. Our biggest worry was, "Can we pay the rent on our apartment from month to month?" When I finally got the job at Timely Comics, I felt very lucky, and that's why I stayed there all those years. I was there 20 to 25 years. Today, people always ask, "Why didn't you ever try to get ownership of some of these characters you created?" That never occurred to me. I just felt like the luckiest guy in the world that I had a job and that I was getting a fairly good salary and, boy, how can life be any better than that?

Lee: I've told that story so many times, for all I know it might be true, but I can't swear to it.

Playboy.com: How about the genesis of the Incredible Hulk?

Lee: I wanted to do a heroic monster, as silly as that sounds. I always liked the movie Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. I had always felt that the monster was really the good guy. He didn't want to hurt anybody, but he was always being chased up the hills by those idiots carrying torches. I wanted to create a character that didn't want to hurt anybody, but because of the way he is, the way he looks, people think he is a menace. I thought it's kind of dull following a monster around all the time, and I remembered Robert Louis Stevenson's Jeckyl and Hyde. I thought it would be cool -- well, I didn't think "cool," in those days, I probably thought "groovy" -- if he could be a normal guy who turned into a monster. The Hulk was really Frankenstein and Jeckyl and Hyde and I put them together.